Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Google Introduces, Then Scraps, Bing-Style Background Images

Posted by timothy on from the go-beyond-your-imitations dept.

NIN1385 writes "Google has scrapped the now infamous background image option on its homepage. After 14 hours of a scheduled 24-hour experiment to see how people liked (or disliked) the new homepage layout, the company must have found out it was very disliked. I guess the fact that 'remove Google background' was the seventh most searched for phrase today might have had something to do with it."

11 of 466 comments (clear)

  1. Thanks god. by Cornwallis · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Now if only they'd get rid of that awful text fading in. What's that about?

  2. There is a reason... by Darkness404 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    There is a reason why few people use Bing, Yahoo!, Live, Ask, etc. if Google wants to branch out in different directions, do it under a different banner other than Google search.

    People like the way Google is/was, if they didn't, there would be a flood of people going to Bing, Yahoo!, Ask, and all the other search engines. Because there isn't, you can pretty easily realize that people like the way Google is.

    --
    Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
    1. Re:There is a reason... by lgw · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Put it this way: today's experiment was New Coke. When you're the number 1 brand, it's stupid to make your product taste more like the number 2 brand. I'm baffled why Google even tried this.

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
  3. iGoogle by somaTh · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Honestly, I haven't seen the main Google page in a while. Had no one sent me the link, I would've missed Pac-Man day.

    --
    Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
  4. You know something has gone seriously wrong... by rm999 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You know something has gone seriously wrong in your company when your employees are ripping off Microsoft's ideas.

    1. Re:You know something has gone seriously wrong... by welcher · · Score: 5, Insightful

      But the whole google search sidebar was ripped off from Bing and seems to be very successful. You'd be in far more trouble if you refused to consider an idea just because it came from a place you didn't like.

  5. Re:Fire that marketroid! by Culture20 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Google seems to have forgotten the early days of the search engine wars in which Yahoo, Excite, et al vied for the most user-hostile, craptacular portal landing pages. I believe it was primarily their choice of a minimal utilitarian design that made people flock to Google, and the quality of the search results, good as they were, was a distant secondary factor among typical users.
    [...]
    Google has officially run out of ideas if this is the best they can come up with.

    Good. Maybe without ideas they'll stagnate and, as a result, remain popular.

  6. I must be the only one by Gudeldar · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I must be the only person on the whole internet who didn't really care about this. Why bother visiting the Google homepage anyway? I just search from Firefox's search box.

    1. Re:I must be the only one by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Google's homepage is the dial tone of the internet.

  7. Re:Google has lost their identity by Cecil · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You look at the desktop a lot? I can barely even remember what my desktop background is. I see it for about 10 seconds after a very rare reboot, while I'm waiting for various maximized applications to start.

    --
    Random and weird software I've written.
  8. Re:Resistance to change by Spad · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Given that so many users use the Google search box as an address bar, I'm amazed that they manage to get as far as opening up their browser without accidentally electrocuting themselves.